User:EdSaperia/Wikimedia UK's 2014 Strategy

There are three initiatives that I'd like to see and contribute to in 2014. As coordinator of Wikimania 2014, which will be the largest Wikimedian event ever, I have command of some considerable resources to support these goals, largely through focusing community attention but also through wider publicity. Wikimedia UK derives its strategy from supporting community initiatives, so it might like to think about how it could support me in these. I'm also looking for something to focus my energies on post Wikimania, whether in a part-time professional or volunteer capacity.

The initiatives are as follows:

A systematic sales effort of the Wikimedia Education Programme to educational institutions in the UK

The Wikimedia Education Programme has been doing great work in the US and, as far as I understand, Canada and the middle east, but I believe it's largely unknown in this country. Given that a lot of the materials exist already, and there is a community set up to support it, I'd like to see a systematic effort to sell the concept of learners as contributors in to secondary schools and undergraduate courses. This would involve a member of staff whose role is to physically travel around educational institutions and conferences presenting the Wikimedia Education Programme. Their success would be measured in the subsequent engagement of institutions in the UK with the programme.

I intend to reach out to educators though their trade bodies and educational press to invite them to Wikimania 2014. Education is also a major theme of the conference, see https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/Future_of_Education, and so we can help set the agenda for this, and seed the ground for such a programme.

London-focused Technical Community Manager

London has a rapidly expanding tech scene, but a very small Wikimedian technical community. Especially with Wikidata on the rise, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to nurture such a community. This would be the role of a community manager, whose job would be to develop marketing materials for community membership, make connections between new and existing community members and organise technology related events. There are similar roles in WMF, notably Quim Gil and Rachel Farrand. The ideal candidate would be familiar with the tech community in London already, be familiar with the Wikimedian community, and have community management and event experience.

I see this as a key step towards WMUK producing significant technology products in the future.

Open Access Reader

I am working on a project called the Open Access Reader. The goal is to set up a systematic process by which all notable open access research is cited in Wikipedia. I imagine this to work roughly as follows:

• Find existing Open Access repositories, and set up a service to regularly scrape them for links to articles and article metadata.
• Dump this catalogue into wikimedia somewhere (a special wikipedia page? wikidata?) where the community can help annotate the aggregated metadata with either likely articles or wikiprojects, so e.g. OA papers that have metadata "heart disease" can be easily associate with wikiproject medicine, or with the article on heart disease, with a simple edit.
• When new OA papers are published into their repositories, a link to them and their abstract will be inserted in some standard useful format onto a subpage of their associated wikiproject, or onto the talk page of their associated article.
• Editors of those articles / members of those wikiprojects can then decide on their notability and insert them into their articles with references with the maximum of ease.

This has the possibility of significantly improving articles across a wide range of subjects, as well as cementing links between academia and Wikimedia. I intend to project manage this, and promote it as part of my Wikimania work. I think it's a realistic scale of project for WMUK to support, and would reflect well on the chapter as a significant Open Access initiative.